An assumption I have is that the author, a known humorist and columnist, decided to write a novel and said to himself, "I have always been told I should write about what I know the most about from my own life." Did Greg Kearney say this to himself as he embarked on this particular novel? I have to wonder, because this is a story about, well, "losers". What can be funny about their grim trajectory as they are sitting on the launchpad of life? I would put this tale into the category of a tragicomedy. One thing that amazed me as I began to read it, was that, despite the obvious collision course toward which Joel Price and all of these characters were accelerating at beyond the speed of light, I found myself laughing at them. Consider the tragedy of twenty-year-old Joel's inability to hold down for more than a day his job as a gay phone-sex worker even though he was being trained by the "office phone-sex royalty", Bernie. Now Joel is representative of the competence and the ambition of most of the characters in this calamitous opus. What do you do when you are average to a little above average in school but find no particular subject that you excel at? You don't like school much, because you are effeminate enough to be obviously queer and bullied virtually daily, and your mother thinks she is supportive by doing things like maybe spitting chewing gum in the hair of the mother of the boy who is bullying you. Now, in addition, neither Joel nor Teresa, his mother, could see how destructive and tragic the outcome of their behaviors might potentially be. Can you see the humor in the scenario yet?
The other side of what I felt as I read was that I could see the horrors that lay ahead for these characters as well as the many other "losers" to come. So, enter the tragic side of the literary formula as well some guilt at laughing at them. Edmund and Binnie, the next characters to be introduced, were equally lame, and I mean that quite literally as physically and / or mentally disabled. Joel met Edmund, a fortyish client, through a phone encounter on the sex line and considered him husband material, inviting himself over and leaving his job because of the perceived lack of need for it there being a "winner" in the sights. Edmund had HIV and had lost most of his friends to the disease while he, himself, had been wrested from the claws of death by the new cocktail available. Edmund fed off Joel's youth until he came upon hustler, Binnie, who was both young and additionally, "butch". Through Binnie Edmund was introduced to a whole new lifestyle that was absolutely vibrant, invigorating and erotically the ultimate along with party drug, Tina. How could Edmund turn down life with Binnie? Of course, finding himself so in love with Binnie, he was even thinking through all of the ways he could help Binnie and make Binnie's life better with a little financial support?
Since the phone sex job did not work out and the relationship to Edmund was lost to Binnie, Teresa took it upon herself to find Joel a job with a sixtyish gay closeted museum curator who had a vast collection of these unusual apparel accessories commonly known as buttons. Donald needed a young man to help him sort and organize this vast collection of buttons as well as his somewhat disorganized and foreign emotional world. This began to look like it might be working when the storyline began to center on Teresa's suddenly rapidly advancing cancer of the lung which had metastasized to various places in her body, liver, brain, etc.
As the novel was beginning to fully flesh out the consequences of the choices and unfolding of the relationships of this entire group of unfortunate characters, it became clear that the relatively remote character, Hugh, Joel's father, would soon be wifeless, ergo rudderless. This dilemma, interestingly, presented an entirely new set of problems and ironic solutions that did fall upon Joel to address. As I bring this review to a close, I hope that I have been able to open a window into the disarray, derangement and chaos that Greg Kearney keenly observed in order to write the clever tragicomedy that is The Desperates. He does bring home the humor in the life of the uncommonly common man.
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